Background: Within semi-closed areas like the Mediterranean Sea, anthropic wastes tend to concentrate in the environment. Metals, in particular, are known to persist in the environment and can affect human health due to accumulation in the food chain. The seagrass Posidonia oceanica, widely found in Mediterranean coastal waters, has been chosen as a "sentinel" to quantify the distribution of such pollutants within the marine environment. Using a technique similar to dendrochronology in trees, it can act as an indicator of pollutant levels over a timeframe of several months to years. In the present study, we measured and compared the levels of eight trace metals (Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Se, Cd, and Pb) in sheaths dated by lepidochronology and in leaves of shoots sampled from P. oceanica meadows collected from six offshore sites in northern Corsica between 1988 and 2004; in the aim to determine 1) the spatial and 2) temporal variations of these metals in these areas and 3) to compared these two types of tissues.

The NeoArabia project tries to understand how environmental, social, economic and technological factors work in concert to influence settlement and abandonment along a latitudinal transect of 1200 km from UAE to southern Oman. This region was affected by wide north-south variations in the Indo-Arabian monsoon, marine upwelling activity and eustatic variations in the Mid-Holocene. On the local settlement scale, this transect is based on fine stratigraphic excavations and permits the reconstruction of the site formation processes and site catchment analysis. A large number of studies have been conducted on the Ruways-1 site, focusing on a deep stratified sequence corresponding to three millennia of occupation. These studies include on-site climate-environmental signal analysis, local palaeogeography and environmental reconstruction, reservoir effect studies, typo-technological studies, palaeoeconomic strategies, anthropological studies, sclerochronological studies and, finally, site formation processes, the understanding of which makes it possible to explain the potential and limits of the archaeological excavation. The first results confirm the richness of these archaeological archives for documenting the socio-environmental dynamics, but also the richness of its complex sedimentary structure and the importance of conducting fine and multidisciplinary excavations to answer questions about the rhythms and functions of occupations and the causalities of socioenvironmental changes. K E Y W O R D S Coastal Neolithic, geoarcheology, shell midden, site catchment, site formation processes, Sultanate of Oman F I G U R E 8 (a) Map of the Ruways micro-region with the proposed Neolithic extension of a wide open lagoon with mangrove ecosystems (in purple) and the two khors situated on each side of the current village of Ruways, with the position of the four geological cores (yellow stars) and the RWY-1 site (orange area). (b) Electrical resistivity tomography section of the current sabkha located in the western part of the RWY-1 site, with the main superficial sedimentary formations and the location of core 4. (c) Lithological sequence of core 4 with the radiocarbon dating series on shells in BP and in cal. yr BC age [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

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